About me

Much of my professional life, spanning 20+ years, has centered around computing. I discovered computers in the early 1980's. The image on the left shows me working on an Othello (reversi) game at Saint Peter's College (1984) on a DEC PDP-11.

During the mid 80's I began working as a part-time programmer on CDC and Prime Mini Computers. However, it wasn't until 1986 that I began professional work at a small accounting business and a few years later at a Patent and Trademark service company. I spent four years working on business applications, the last of which was a check imaging application for IBM and the Security Pacific Automation Company, which was part of Security Pacific National Bank - later acquired by Bank of America. Shortly thereafter I transitioned from banking into consumer products. In 1990 I joined the Symantec - Peter Norton Group and later worked for a string of game companies.

By 2000 I helped ship over twelve commercial software applications and completed a ten year career as a developer / manager of consumer products. At this point I began focusing on the development of Internet applications in business computing.

Inspired by the SETI@home project in 2001 I began work on a personal project to create the largest distributed networked chess playing machine. I was joined a few months later by Colin Frayn and together with hundreds of volenteers we created ChessBrain. The ChessBrain project went on to recieve a 2005 Guinness World Record as "The World's Largest Networked Chess Computer".

During the past five years I've done a fare amount of writing. My work has been published by IBM, IEEE, O'Reilly, Prentice Hall, Springer, The Linux Journal and others.

Presently, I'm the Director of Software Development for a Merchant Services company. Prior, I was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Group at Countrywide Financial Corporation.

Inspired by my 10 year old daughter I began working on a rather unique website called ZoeyBot. ZoeyBot is a educational webtop for kids that is centered on search. The site allows me to utilize skills which I would otherwise have very little use for these days...

Simply stated, my passion is manifesting deep thoughts by pushing technological envelopes.

Here are some of my current interests:

Software Development Distributed Computing Search Engines

Network Theory